Edmund (“Terry”) Burke III is Research Professor of History and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The receipient of numerous honors and awards, he was the founder and first Director of the Center of World History at UCSC. Burke is the author or editor of 14 books most recently Islam and World History: The Ventures of Marshall Hodgson Chicago, 2018) and The Ethnographic State: France, Morocco and Islam, 1890-1925 (Berkeley: California, 2014).
Trained in modern European history and Middle Eastern Studies at Princeton University, (PhD. 1970) I focused on the contemporary history of Morocco just as it was becoming independent from French colonial rule.
I was hired at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Merrill College in 1968. It was a year of enormous political and cultural excitement in California and in the world.
I taught modern French history, the history of the modern Middle East, and the Islamic history survey for the “Board of Studies in History” of UCSC and Third World Studies (the pedagogical theme) at Merrill College.
Later in my career I developed and taught upper division and graduate world history and founded the World History Center. In the final decades of my career, I developed a two quarter upper division course in modern Mediterranean history (1492-1942).
My research and Teaching reflected the times, but also my evolving interests. I discuss below these different aspects of my intellectual formation and how it was reflected in my teaching and research.